adventurer plants an unlucky blow of the mattock among the toes of his right foot, and sinking down upon the grass, “falls straightway into a trance.” Upon recovering from this trance, Mr. Lee finds himself in a very singular predicament. He feels exceedingly light and buoyant, with the power of moving without exertion. He sweeps along without putting his feet to the ground, and passes among shrubs and bushes without experiencing from them any hindrance to his progress. In short, he finds himself to be nothing better than a ghost. His dead body is lying quietly beside the excavation under the beech-tree. Mr. Lee is entirely overcome with horror at his unfortunate condition, and runs, or rather flies, instinctively to the nearest hut for assistance. But the dogs, at his approach, run howling among the bushes, and the only answer he receives from the terrified family is the discharge of a blunderbuss in his face. Returning in despair to the beech-tree and the pit, he finds that his body has been taken away. Its disappearance throws him into a phrenzy, and he is about to run home and summon old Jim Jumble to the rescue, when he hears a dog yelping and whining in a peculiarly doleful manner, at some little distance down in the meadow. Coming to a place in the edge of the marsh where are some willow trees, and an old worn fence, he there discovers to his extreme surprise, the body of a certain well-to-do personage, Squire Higginson. He is lying against the fence, stone dead, with his head down, and his heels resting against the rails, and looking as if, while climbing, he had fallen down and broken his neck. Our hero pities the condition of Mr. Higginson, but being only a ghost, has no capacity to render him assistance. In this dilemma he begins to moralize upon the condition of Mr. H. and of himself. The one has no body—the other no soul. “Why might not I”—says, very reasonably, the ghost of Mr. Lee, “Why might not I—that is to say my spirit—deprived by an unhappy accident of its natural dwelling—take possession of a tenement which there remains no spirit to claim, and thus, uniting interests together, as two feeble factions unite together in the political world, become a body possessing life, strength, and usefulness? Oh, that I might be Squire Higginson!” The words are scarcely out of his mouth, before our hero feels himself vanishing, as it were, into the dead man's nostrils, “into which his spirit rushes like a {664} breeze,” and the next moment he finds himself John Hazlewood Higginson, Esquire, to all intents and purposes—kicking the fence to pieces in a lusty effort to rise upon his feet, and feeling as if he had just tumbled over it. We must here give a couple of pages in the words of the author.